A quick tour of contacts and companies

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Whether you're a business that has relationships with other businesses or you work directly with consumers, you are still focusing on people and their companies. Your contacts and companies in HubSpot are your central databases for keeping track of all the people and companies that have a relationship with your business.

A contact can be added to the contacts tool when they submit a form on your website, are part of a spreadsheet that you import into your account, are manually created individually, or are created through an API integration that you've set up with your account. Depending on how the contact is originally created, the Email property or user token associated with the record will be used tode-duplicate contacts. You can create custom contact properties to generate effective workflows and marketing actions. You can also use the contacts and lists tools to segment and track your contacts, which allows you to better understand their interests and needs.

A company can be added to your companies tool manually, via a company import, from the prospects tool (SalesStarter and Professional only), via the Automatically create and associate companies with contacts setting, or through an API integration that you've set up with your account. The Company domain name property is used to de-duplicate company records. You can create custom company properties to use in saved filters and workflows (workflows are a feature of MarketingProfessional and Enterprise and Sales Professional only).

Contact and company records can be associated with each other manually, automatically, or via an API integration you set up in your account. By associating these two records types, you can learn more about your contacts' business interests and challenges and how you can best serve their needs and the needs of their companies.

In this guide, you'll learn how to engage with your contact and company records along with contact and company properties, which store information about each of your records. This guide covers:

Edit columns or properties: click Customize > Edit columns or Edit properties to edit the columns that appear in the dashboard view (such as Name, Email, and HubSpot owner) or to edit the properties associated with each record.

Import records: click Import in the upper right-hand corner to import contact or company records. Learn more about importing here.

Create a contact or company: click Create contact or Create company to create a new contact or company record. Learn more about creating a new contact or company record below.

Create saved filters: click + Add filter to create a new filter or click All saved filters to open the saved filters that you have previously built. Learn more about creating saved filters here.

Hover over a contact or company in the dashboard and click Preview to open a sidebar menu of additional information on the record. You can also click on the contact or company name to open the record. Learn more about previewing and opening contact and company records in a later section of this guide.

Create a contact or company record

The more contact and company records you have, the bigger your pool is for analyzing your records. A large sample size proves better for making an accurate analysis, which in turn will help you improve your business's ability to cater to the needs and interests of your contacts.

After clicking Create contact or Create company, fill in the information you know about the person or business in the right sidebar menu that appears. If you're creating a contact, Email, First name, and Last name will show by default. If you're creating a company record, Company domain name and Name will show by default. After filling in Email for contacts or Company domain name for companies, the additional properties specified in your property settings for contact or company creation will appear. When you're done, click Create contact/company or click Create and add another.

Preview and open contact and company records

From the contacts or companies dashboard, hover over a contact or company and click Preview to see a quick view of the record.

Click the contact's or company's name to see the full record. Here you can see more information about the contact or company and the interactions they've had with your site. The About section on the left-hand side will show any default properties you've chosen to display here. Click View > View all properties to see all the information you have for the record.

You can also see other information stored in cards on the left-hand side of the record, such as an associated contact or company card, associated deals card, an attachments card, etc.

The right-hand side of the record is the timeline, showing all engagements for the contact or company. You can select which engagements you'd like to see on the timeline by clicking the Filter activity dropdown menu. There's a box above the timeline where you can interact with the contact or interact with one of a company's associated contacts, such as sending an email or placing a call.

Contact and company properties

Properties in HubSpot can be applied to individual contact records or companies associated with your contacts. They help you keep all the details you have on your contact and company records organized. With properties, you can also:

View and export property history

You can export the historical values of a property by clicking on a property name in your property settings and then clicking Export property history in the upper right-hand corner.

In the dialog box, enter the email address you'd like the export sent to, and select your file format. Then click Export.

The file will include a list of the past values for the property, along with the email addresses of the contacts; the source of each change will not be included.

To see the property history values for a specific contact or company, click on the contact or company name from your contacts or companies dashboard. In the About section, hover over the property and click See history. A menu will appear with all the historical values for the property, along with the source of the change.

Edit an individual contact's or company's property value

While you can edit the property itself, you can also edit the value of a property for a contact or company right from the record.

Click on the contact or company record you'd like to edit a property for. In the About section, you can click into a property, enter a new value, and then click Save.

Alternatively, you can click View > View all properties to see a list of all the contact or company properties and the values that the contact or company has for each property. Use the search bar to search for a specific property. Then click into the property to enter a new value and click Save.